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critiquing the suffering of contemporary philosophers at the hands of author-
ity, especially in Catholic Europe. Luca Giordano, The Death of Seneca. Louvre,
Paris.
the li bretti sts
sure. Ottavia, with her unappealing chastity and condemna-
tion of female existence, left out of the erotic triangle, is ex-
iled not only physically but also musically and left to die
under ambiguous circumstances. At the conclusion of the
opera, it is Poppea s sensuality that commands the stage.10
Heller s interpretation has the advantage, first of all, be-
cause it acknowledges the power of sexuality, but also be-
cause it comes closer to conveying the carnivalesque character
of early Venetian operatic theater, the fascination of contem-
poraries with women on the stage and with the sensuous
capacity of the female voice, and most of all the peculiar
composition of the Venetian audience. Who, after all, was
listening in all those opera boxes? I would suggest that there
were hardly any Ottavias but plenty of Poppeas Venetian
courtesans or at least women whose connection to their
male companions was irregular and in fact they must have
been there simply because so few Venetian patricians, male
or female, were married in the 1640s. As Heller has shown,
seventeenth-century Venetian opera displayed an abiding fas-
cination with prostitutes and female sexuality, manifest most
graphically in the stories of Poppea and Messalina, a fascina-
tion that faded in the eighteenth century. Venetian opera
came to maturity at a moment when the practice of restricted
marriage for patrician men and monachization by force for
patrician women left most upper-class members of society
out of the marriage market. Venice had become the world of
the single self, of persons who defined their social status
and their sexuality outside of the bonds of marriage.11 For
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The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance
many men extramarital liaisons were the norm; as a result,
seventeenth-century Venice developed what Laura McGough
has termed a thriving sexual economy, which produced not
just numerous courtesans but many informal relationships
and a network of social institutions created to provide so-
cial welfare for retired prostitutes and cast-off mistresses.12 It
was precisely at the moment when Poppea first appeared on
the operatic stage that the full implications of the Venetian
marriage market had become obvious. With the produc-
tion of Poppea, the opera box became a model of the opera
stage, where the relation between lust and love, sex and mar-
riage, personal fulfillment and stoic suffering were very much
thrown into question.
The masked occupants of the opera boxes were tempo-
rarily escaping from one of the most rigid marital regimes
known to history. Since at least 1422 the Venetian patriciate
had attempted to impose on its members a rigorous endog-
amy that prevented noble men from marrying women from
outside the patriciate. The 1422 law of the Great Council de-
nied membership in the nobility to sons born to noble fa-
thers and mothers of lesser status. In 1506 the Council of
Ten instituted the Libro d Oro to register male noble births
as a mechanism for disqualifying sons born to lower-class
women, thereby protecting the Great Council from contam-
ination, blemishing, or any other denigration. By 1526 the
burden of proof moved from birth registers of noble sons to
marriage registers that provided evidence of the nobility of
both husband and wife. Besides barring bastards and sons of
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the li bretti sts
non-noble mothers from the privileges of noble status, the
new laws imposed a formal civil marriage procedure on the
members of the ruling class. Thus, determining parentage on
both sides became the means for guaranteeing endogamy
within the ruling class.13
The consequence of Venetian marriage practices was thus
the systematic production of patrician bachelors and patri-
cian nuns. During the fifteenth century about half the male
nobles who lived to adulthood remained bachelors. Some
voluntarily chose celibacy, whether within the Church or
without, and others were drawn to homoerotic relationships,
but most seem to have had little choice whether to marry
or not.14 By the middle of the sixteenth century the combi-
nation of dowry inflation, which discouraged many patri-
cian fathers from undertaking the expense of marrying their
daughters, and price inflation, which eroded patrimonies, en-
couraged the practice of restricted marriage: families limited
the number of children allowed to marry in order to pre-
vent dispersal of the patrimony. There existed both a finan-
cial and a political logic to marriage restriction. In the ab-
sence of primogeniture laws, an inheritance had to be shared
among all legitimate male offspring in each generation, and a
partible inheritance became a diminished inheritance. For
those seeking political alliances through marriage, a potential
groom whose brothers did not marry would not be dis-
tracted by other affinal connections and could give his full
support to his own in-laws, especially when it came to elec-
tion to lucrative offices.15 The officially unmarried brothers
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The Culture Wars of the Late Renaissance
entered the sexual economy of Venice on their own terms
through liaisons with male lovers, mistresses, prostitutes, cour-
tesans, or secret marriages with lower-class women.
The same pressures that forced brothers to become bache-
lors drove an even higher percentage of their sisters into con-
vents, whether they had a vocation or not. Throughout Italy
between 1550 and 1650 the mushrooming monachization rates
meant that aristocratic women everywhere were more likely
to become nuns than wives. In Venice the increase was partic-
ularly dramatic: in 1581 nearly 54 percent of patrician women
were nuns, and by the 1642 43 opera season, when Poppea was
first produced, 82 percent may have become nuns, although
this figure seems inflated.16 A conservative estimate might be
that during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
about 60 percent of Venetian patrician women could be
found in convents. Jutta Gisela Sperling demonstrates how
the pressures of the dowry system and restricted marriage
practices played out differently for women than for men.
Even when blocked from marrying women of their own class,
patrician men had access to the sexual economy or could
marry secretly. In a sample of mid-seventeenth-century secret
marriages registered in the Venetian curia, some 35 percent
were between noblemen and women of lower class, but there
is only one example of a noblewoman marrying a com-
moner. Unmarried patrician women were denied access to
both the sexual economy and clandestine marriage oppor-
tunities.17 Their fertility and their lives were squandered. In-
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the li bretti sts
voluntary nuns were condemned to the hell of convent im-
prisonment, unpurged of their sensual desires despite their
chaste marriage to Christ, as the otherwise antagonistic writ-
ers Arcangela Tarabotti and Ferrante Pallavicino both recog-
nized.
The results were a tragic waste of human potential un-
bridled sexual exploitation of lower-class women by noble-
men; frustration and anger among the nuns deprived of plea-
sure and fulfillment in life; and the demographic suicide of
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